Friedrich Nietzsche

Key ideas

Nietzsche's announcement that 'God is dead' was not a celebration but a diagnosis: belief in God no longer anchored European culture, and the values built on it would collapse, threatening nihilism. His question was what could replace them.

In On the Genealogy of Morality he traced the history of moral concepts, arguing that ideals such as humility and pity originated in the resentment of the weak against the strong. He did not argue that morality is simply false, but that it must be judged by whether it enhances or diminishes life.

His test of a life is the eternal recurrence: could you will to live your life again, exactly the same, infinitely many times? To say yes is amor fati, love of one's fate. He imagined the Übermensch as someone who creates their own values and affirms life completely. These ideas run through the meaning of life and existence precedes essence.

Life, briefly

Nietzsche was the son of a Lutheran pastor and became a professor of classical philology at Basel at only twenty-four. Ill health forced him to resign in 1879, and he spent the next decade travelling between boarding houses in Switzerland and Italy, writing his major books.

In January 1889 he collapsed in Turin and never recovered his mind. His sister, who later edited his unpublished notes, promoted a distorted version of his work that was later used by the Nazis, though Nietzsche himself had despised both nationalism and antisemitism.

Major works

• The Gay Science (1882)
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85)
• Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
• On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)
• Twilight of the Idols (1889)

Schools of thought

Existentialism

Further reading

• EncyclopediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche
• WikipediaFriedrich Nietzsche